


Disposable Bodies

by nimmieamee



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study, Dark, Gen, litficcy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-18
Updated: 2014-09-18
Packaged: 2018-02-17 20:29:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2322179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimmieamee/pseuds/nimmieamee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Did you know that Erskine once built a bodyswap machine? No? Neither did anyone else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Disposable Bodies

This man had a great relationship with his employers.

They needed him. This is how not to be disposed of: one must be needed. They needed him because he understood bodies. But he was slippery. He knew he was slippery, he would sit at his kitchen table and consider his own waveringness, his succession of identities: Raske, Reinstein, Jollenbeck, Tauber, Abbink, Erskine, Rademaker. He lived in a place that was all identical terraced houses, brown brick, perfectly modern, dull and even for miles, except for the pockets of green for fields and the strips between the highways. He assigned a name to each house. This one Raske, this one Jollenbeck, that one Rademaker. He thought this was fitting. Each house was the same. So too were all the men he’d been the same, the same body. But one never knew what was happening just behind the front of the house, just inside the body. Here, this house Tauber, it had been a young man visiting Vienna, entranced by order. And here this house, this Abbink, it had been an older man in Berlin, cowering at the young, at their polished boots, at their love of breaking glass. So the body said nothing about the person; inside, behind the façade, one might be anything.

He was employed to study bodies anyway. His life’s work was bodies. He charted them carefully – the strength in some places, the weakness in others, the deformities that could accumulate: freaks and pinheads and wizened early infants at Coney Island. And the beauty that could result, as in the bored perfect glances of the women on Mr. Stark’s arm on Park Avenue. He knew about columns of bodies: marching bodies, ordered bodies, black and red, arms raised, so many great bodies for miles, beautiful, neat, terrifying.

Oh, how he hated bodies.

Take Mr. Stark. Mr. Stark was not a body. On first examination the lines of him were easily sketched out: the masculine trimness of him, the confident movements, the easy turn of the lip when he spoke. But this was no real accounting of Mr. Stark. The reality of him was a living glint. This glint! Wrap him in five foot ten, striped waistcoat, money, flat and intelligent eyes, what difference did it make? Mr. Stark was not those things. He was a glint, a spark, a reaction. Simply a reaction. A soul like a huddle of wires that was always rearranging itself, crackling dangerously, creating life here, death there: this was him, always changing.

Mr. Stark was constant in his change. In this they were kindred spirits. So the old man did not care about needing him. He liked him.

And their huddle, their loose network of body-defiers included one more: Agent Carter. Another kindred spirit.

“But this is an insult!” Tauber would have said, young and stupid in Vienna. To give him as an attaché not a powerful, threatening man with slicked back hair. But this. This person: thin ankles, neat makeup,  _curls_. What a cruel blow from the employers! The great U S of A, which needs you, but does not want you, and furthermore will not notice you, will hand you this person (woman, not simply a person, but woman), and also this other one, this untouchable young drunk whom you cannot fire even if you want to. Reinstein, Erskine, Jollenbeck, whatever your name is. If in fact it was not changed on the crossing over, which it might be, this being the land of new identities, new persons to fill the same old body.

Never mind that. No matter this U S of A, or even this untouchable drunk. Agent Carter made up for it. In Agent Carter he had a future, he had almost a son.

Not a daughter. He’d already had a daughter. Light brown hair, wide eyes, adored, small hands on his jacket lapels when his name was Raske and he was in love, in Amsterdam in the summer. Adored, protected, this girl: forever this baby. To die in a year’s time in Baden Baden. He would never hear that she’d died. He only suspected it would happen, and behind the neat plain brick house front of him he dreaded it: Raske dreaded it, and Reinstein, and Jollenbeck, and nearly all of them. But the Erskine in him lived here and now and had only one child: this agent. She would not replace his daughter. She had an entirely different function. She was a son. She faced him, assessed him, reconciled herself to him, and promulgated his line.

The line of the great body-haters, the people who despise exteriors.

Her exterior she kept neat. She kept it businesslike in spite of its many perturbing qualities. Day in, day out, this distracting woman’s body, the same old Agent Carter, the one the lieutenants sneered at and leered at, the Woman’s body, this was to be whitewashed with defiant calm, pruned in khaki and army green. Around the teeth, a splash of red like the mouth of a shark, a small tight threat. But aside from that she handled this form of hers professionally, without emotion. Why would she have emotion? It did not matter, this body.

No, the hard strong valor  _inside_  the body. This was her. What did he find one day? He watched her turn a corner, see the typist backed against the wall. And she pulled off the offending young lieutenant and kicked him in the backside, sent him sprawling to the floor. Then reappeared before him in the meeting with the colonels, quiet and professional. With a hint of a smile. Only a hint of the firmness in her. She could bring it to heel at will, her courage simmering down into cool soldier’s attention. And this was what mattered. The body? Nothing. She too changed its name at will. Eva, Greta, Margaret, 13, Amelie, Selma, Marie. She was eternally changing. The rows of men in green and khaki would come knocking at the doors of her, sniggering, seeking to expose some hidden vulnerability inside. But if it existed she simply whisked it off and replaced it with steel, reinventing herself.

There were said to be several classifications of people. On the one hand Aryans, on the other sub-Aryans, and years ago in Vienna the young man Tauber had seen them begin the study of the body to advance this, measure around the head, show the weakness of the animals, the ugliness of the earliest forms of life, the retardation of the ape to create man, the devolution of man to ape, the stepladder of the races. But no, the races could not be divided that way. There were only two races: the race that was governed by its form, and the race that was not. And one night, when he was Jollenbeck, maybe, he hit on a way to eliminate the former.

We will not let the form govern the fate of the man. We will make the  _man_ , the heart of him, govern the form.

Yes.

And this is why his employers brought him here, to the great U S of A, to meet with the woman and the drunk, and when they were before him they pointed out, each in their own way (his confident, hers professional) one hard truth, one terrible reality he hadn’t wanted to face: “What if the inner life of the person is no better? What if it is evil? What if it takes away all that is good, the untouched wizened child, the perfect girl on your arm, and sends her to – oh, to Baden Baden?”

Well. At least he had exposed it then. At least he had injected it and watched as the veins swelled, the eyes bulged, the evil became mirrored outside. Yes. Yes. Oh, this world wants bodies so badly. It ranks people by them. It dissects people according to form and blood. Oh, why not. Why not let them see the truth. Why not give the body some  _meaning_?

He began to see people as they truly were. Others could not see – this was why he made the serum. But he began to see. It seemed to him that live wire Mr. Stark, who buzzed and cooed over these bored, perfect women on Park Avenue, oh, how changed he would be, with the serum. What would happen to him? Would he become the thing he cleaimed to adore? Would he wake and be a she, a girl to set the conversation crackling? What a nightmare for Mr. Stark. He would prefer to be a simple electrical current, probably. Perhaps the serum would give him that.

And who would Agent Carter be? Jonah, maybe. Jael hammering the tent peg through the head of the enemy in his green khakis. Samson.

Make us a Samson! cried his employers.

But she was right there, and they did not want her.

Here is what they wanted: a fast man, a strong man, a Nazi-hater German-hater, a man who despised the wicked of the race, who believed in Christian goodness, U S of A, white with white teeth and a wholesome smile on the front page of the paper, someday a little wife at home, a little daughter, a son to promulgate the line, all the body of him sketched out perfectly to meet the nation's needs, a man to beat down opponents and send them like the Japs to Minidoka. A bully.

But these were in great supply. They didn’t need another one.

Here is what he found: a persistent man, not without some slyness, glancing uneasily over his shoulder when he was found out, mapping escape routes from the room, skinny from illness and want and wanting to prove himself, prepared to contest that 4F on the paper, prepared to contest them all, to freely defy, defying his friend outside; a believing man, but a suspicious one too, to have successfully concocted so many aliases, so many false hometowns; but not a liar, not interested in lies, tired and honest, very honest, holding out his body: here I am again. This is me. Take this. I want you to have it. I know it’s not much. But it’s mine, and I’ll give it.

He did not really know what the serum would make of Steven. He only knew it would not be what they wanted: they wanted a lifeless, poseable body, a thing to regurgitate orders, to head a column of marching men.  But who cared about bodies? Here was a living person, a person who wanted to give all he had.

This slip of a person, no one needed him. He was disposable. This was the bright side, Philips said darkly one day. If it all goes to hell, all we’ll lose is Rogers. Poor good stupid skinny little shit.

The new man, this Erskine, would wake in the night and the words would ring around his brain. All we will lose is the glass storefronts, the towns, the good people, the scared people, the smiling Frau who sees me with my daughter in my arms and welcomes me in, Germany, the little girl with her wide eyes, the identity, the name, and Rogers. Poor good stupid skinny little shit. All these disposable things. We don’t need them.

Outside the castle, in the snow, there had been the pile of limbs and dissected torsos, the pieces all cut up like one could find something worthwhile by examining the form. And his research partner stared at them through thick glass spectacles and said, “Well, Viktor, there will be more tomorrow. I will telegram Herr Gerstle at the camp to send new bodies. And how is little Esme, eh, does she remember uncle Arnim?”

He fantasized of taking Arnim and swapping him for the young men on the table, switching out one for the other, so that the casual evil of Arnim would bleed away, and next to him, reborn in Arnim’s small and inoffensive form, these scared young people, now proper, acceptably Aryan at last, as though that mattered. He would give them Arnim’s coat and let them walk away free. He fantasized of taking his daughter and swapping her for some rebel girl, some defiant creature who could survive, and then Esme would be with him here instead. He fantasized of taking all the giving young men from broken glass places, places of want, and instead giving them Park Avenue and money and waistcoats and everything, so that they had more to give, let them give: always the people who had nothing wanted to give. They had so much nothing, after all.

There was a great deal of mischief in him. There always had been. Mischievous Viktor, Raske, Jakob, Reinstein, Franz, Abbink, Emil, Tauber, Erskine. Always there. Constant even as he changed. If all was lost, he thought, and in came enemies, so proud of their great mechanized orderly marching perfect bodies, well. He would take that away from them.

He sketched out these mischievous dreams in his modern terraced house in Queens. Never told anyone, not even Agent Carter his son, or dear Mr. Stark the drunk. He made plans and he built, late into the night, using Mr. Stark’s assistants. They thought they were making modifications to Project Rebirth. Even Mr. Stark thought they were doing that.

When a threatening man with slicked back hair came and shot Erskine, these modified machines – waiting in the wings to be used — were gathered up and put in a truck while Agent Carter stood over them, holding a clipboard, jotting down efficient notes that captured nothing. The truck went out to the address given by Mr. Stark. And everything sat there for a very long time, these old metal bodies in the dark. No one bothered with them. One day, in the seventies or so, a sick old man, small and inoffensive, came to look at them and pronounced them useless. These notes here. Bodies, bodies. So Viktor never got past that, did he? Never realized the supremacy of the consciousness? What a fool.

And then he left these machines there with the other needless, disposable things. His employers did not remark on it. Can it help the U S of A, Dr. Zola?

No? Never mind then.  

**Author's Note:**

> If I had time I would fast forward a few years and let the WS discover it and turn this into a full-on bodyswap horror fic. Alas. No time.


End file.
